


lineal

by sybilius



Category: Death Note & Related Fandoms, Death Note: Another Note
Genre: 50 sentence fic, Attempted Suicide Mention, B's sad life story, Burns Mention, Character Study, Drug use mention, M/M, Plays on words, Prose Poem, Sexual content mention, Sort Of, murder mention, sad fic, self harm mention, this is my son and I love him :(
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-19 13:52:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11899107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sybilius/pseuds/sybilius
Summary: So if it’s a crime if he spends some time in the mirror getting at the right laugh, the right tone to catch the perfect hilarity of the way the lines have dragged him here, well.They'd better goddamn arrest him.*50 sentences on Beyond Birthday's life and the death he would have wanted.





	lineal

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this ages and ages ago, and now I've decided it belongs here :) Hopefully you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Beyond Birthday, paradoxically, doesn’t believe in fate.

When the historians lay out the timeline of events, one after the other, cause and effect, just the same as the physicists with their neat trajectories and entire beings reduced to a single point, B laughs until they have to stop class to ask what’s funny.

 _It’s funny the way you think it all makes sense_.

“Nothing at all,” His smile is as sweet as the sticky jam on his fingertips.

“What were you really laughing at?” Lawliet asks him later, and he shakes his head and smiles at the distant numbers whirling around Lawliet’s razor-sharp cheekbones.

B only knows the answer a few years later, when they call him  _Backup_  for a reason that isn’t A being a shithead.

It’s funny because his  _business_  is cause and effect, connecting it all into webs all screaming towards an inevitable conclusion that B can see right down to the day.

It’s funny the way the threads tangle up, make him ask  _why here, why now_  for every death he can see coming in the spinning red numbers beneath the names.

It’s funny when he asks himself,  _did it have to be me?_  , right after he’s got murder on his hands in the name of justice with a capital L.

It’s not really that funny, not at all.

*

A doesn’t come before B, but she’s the first to ask who comes after L.

First to claim the lineage as hers before Lawliet even has a say in it.

B thinks it’s cheap, marking someone down for dead when they aren’t even thirteen yet, but Lawliet doesn’t seem to mind, after all, B’s already told him he has too many years left to worry about that.

Far more than her, anyways.

B nicknames her ‘Ace’, but thinks of her as ‘Ambition’, or sometimes ‘Adder’, because she’s more like a snake than a human being, though her camouflage is even better than his.

A nicknames him ‘Backup’.

 It earns her a punch in the gut, and both of them fight  _dirty_ , but when B washes off his knuckles he realizes the barb doesn’t sting as much as it should.

When he mentions it to Lawliet, off hand like it doesn’t  _grate_ on his senses, Lawliet just gives him a curious smile.

“But you do have my back, right B?”

As it turns out, he rather likes the name.

*

Lawliet himself is a gridwork, the perfect criss-cross of people and puzzles exactly in their place.

It astounds B, how much safety there is in it his netting, and yet he feels like a maze B could zig-zag through for years and still end up in the same place.

Though every year it gets harder to navigate, detective and hunting dog, every year B sees a little more than he  _should_ , and Lawliet pushes a little longer than he  _should_.

Lawliet is an addict, and he’s addicted to L.

His cases are cut up like white lines of coke, and he sucks them up one after the other like they keep him alive.

“You gonna come to bed?”

Not that B can talk, his addiction is just as strong, strung out on the angles of Lawliet’s bones, the slash of those thin lips, the patterns Lawliet’s fingertips drag out of his skin.

“Maybe when I’m finished this. If you make it worth my time.”

Lawliet smirks when he says it, and B has him gasping in seconds, pulse-pounding,  _give me another hit_ , till neither of them can see where one begins, the other ends.

Their partnership burns up neat lines, redraws them, crosses them out again, defies prediction, logic, reason.

*

B screams when he wakes a year later and Lawliet still isn’t there, but every time he looks in the mirror L is hanging over his shoulder.

Maybe Lawliet died, and he died with him, maybe B killed him, and maybe they strangled each other, but B isn’t anyone’s backup anymore.

Least of all the cheap pair-of-lines letter that swallowed him up, swallowed up his lover, swallowed up anything he’d ever gave a damn about.

All that’s left now is the red lines he’s read far too often to wonder if anyone can stop them anymore, if there’s anything to be done but to  _follow, follow_ , paint himself with all he’s known he could have done.

If it’s fate, he’s always done it.

So if it’s a crime if he spends some time in the mirror getting at the right laugh, the right tone to catch the perfect hilarity of the way the lines have dragged him here, well.

They'd better goddamn arrest him.

And they do, but just on the cusp of perfection, so that he’s in agony for days while they try and uncook his flesh and a hunched figure stares wordlessly by his bedside.

“Did it have to be me?” is the only thing he asks, B is sure he’s imagining the question, but  _what a question._

B laughs his  _perfect_ , practiced laugh, and says, “ _Yes_.”

*

For the first year, all he does is carve up patterns, numbers, ley lines into the surface of the concrete-and-bars they throw him in.

A year later, there’s someone coming by his cell.  

It isn’t until after the first eight visits that he even entertains the notion (with a laugh) that the Lawliet visiting his cell isn’t one his mind is creating for him.

On the tenth, B quietly says, “Fuck off,” and can’t bring himself to beg when Lawliet turns to go.

On the eleventh, he doesn’t say anything, just inclines his head, and Lawliet tells him about the heart attacks, the first, the second,  _everything_. 

B is surprised that it still catches him by the throat, the idea that Lawliet might yet die before what’s written in red.

He turns his back and leans his spine so that it aligns up with the iron bars, straight, for once, “I’m not liking your odds. You might not make it out of this one, I don’t know.”

There’s a warmth at B’s back, so unexpected that he almost flinches back, breaking the border of contact. “You might not either.”

Spine against spine, every vertebra connecting the dots, and Lawliet’s white hand that slides through the bars to touch his.

B smiles against the taut line of lips that are too melted to turn up anymore.


End file.
